alt Hacker NewsDon't air traffic controllers get paid at a higher rate for overtime than for their 'regular hours'?
If so, doesn't the understaffing (lower # of employees) result in each employee being overpaid (paid a higher hourly rate)?
EDIT: And it seems like air traffic controllers can retire after just 20 years and draw a defined benefit pension: https://www.faa.gov/nyc-atc
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The politicization of government budgeting has made inefficiency rife. Sometimes new allocations are done purely for brownie points and there's genuine wastage - other times cuts are made that save a penny but lose a pound in the guise of efficiency. Doge was an excellent example in just how many severance payouts for employees who were occasionally rehired due to staffing shortages it triggered.
Nurses also get paid more for night shifts, doesn't mean they're 'overpaid'
Yes, when they work overtime they get paid more for that overtime than regular time.
The money doesn't somehow make it sustainable for the people burning out their lives. Working 7 days a week, including overnight shifts, for 20 years to collect a pension seems like WELL earned compensation.
That's seems unrelated to "we have so few" and "we enmiserate the one's we do have".
Doesn’t this seem like the common practice in high-pension systems? You don’t use the overtime in pension calculations so it’s way cheaper to hire P people and run them on a 2x duty cycle than it is to hire 2P people and run them on a 1x duty cycle because the post retirement cost is Q in the first and 2Q in the latter.
You can’t account for overtime in pensions because the employees will conspire to force overtime for retiring employees to bounce the pension up. Just a natural risk with an entity that can’t go bankrupt hiring people.
It’s also the only industry that is legally allowed to practice ageism. You have to start before or up to 31 years of age. You’re out at age 56. This figures into how the benefits are structured.
You can still do contract ATC work after 56.